The Nonlinear Library EA - Shrimp paste might consume more animal lives than any other food product. Who's working on this? by Angelina Li
Oct 31, 2023
07:02
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Shrimp paste might consume more animal lives than any other food product. Who's working on this?, published by Angelina Li on October 31, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
Epistemic status:
Low resilience
. Quick writeup from an amateur with 0 background in shrimp or animal welfare research. Writing this to spur discussion, and because I can't find a basic writeup of this case anywhere. I would be very happy to be proven wrong on anything in this post :)
TL;DR
Acetes japonicus are potentially
the most common species of animal killed for food production
today, by number of individuals.
They are used to create akiami shrimp paste
, a product used predominantly as a flavoring base in Southeast Asian and Southern Chinese cuisines.
There's some reason to believe shrimp paste could be easier to create plant based substitutes for, compared to other shrimp products, and that the alternative proteins market might not naturally have the right incentives to create excellent substitutes very quickly.
I'm unsure if anyone has done targeted welfare research on these animals, to answer basic questions like: Do they suffer? How much?
This seems like a huge gap in the effective animal advocacy space: I'd be really excited to see more work done here.
Important
There are a lot of individuals here:
A recent Rethink Priorities
survey
of shrimp killed in food production, concluded tentatively that:
There are
3.9-50.2 trillion wild caught A. japonicus individuals
killed every year for food production
A. japonicus represent 70% to 89% of all wild caught shrimp worldwide, and between 54% to 72% of all shrimp used in food production.
This implies that
A. japonicus are currently the most common species killed for food production
.
[1]
Below I have adapted a
figure
from the authors to include A. japonicus (although note the error bars on both of the shrimp estimates are very wide).
It seems plausible we should care about these individuals:
I'm not really sure what evidence we have on the welfare capacity of A. japonicus (although note this
report
on shrimp sentience more generally). But it seems hard to rule out the fact that we care about these shrimp without further research.
I think this argument from another Rethink Priorities
post
probably applies:
Small invertebrates, like shrimp and insects, have relatively low probabilities of being sentient but are extremely numerous. But because these probabilities aren't
extremely
low - closer to 0.1 than to 0.000000001 - the number of individuals carries enormous weight. As a result, EV maximization tends to favor actions that benefit numerous animals with relatively low probabilities of sentience over actions that benefit larger animals of more certain sentience.
In general,
not spending a ton of time investigating to what extent the animals most killed for food production matter morally
seems clearly like a big mistake.
Neglected
You might expect that Shrimp Welfare Project would be working on this problem, but they are explicitly not planning to do this.
Here is what they say about A. japonicus
:
The majority of wild-caught shrimps are a single species - A. japonicus - and are crushed and used to produce "
shrimp paste
", a salty, fermented condiment used in Southeast Asian and Southern Chinese cuisine. We believe the shrimp paste market is very different to the contexts in which we work (i.e. the international import/export market for
L. Vannamei / P. Monodo
n shrimps). It's often made by fishing families in coastal villages, and production techniques can vary from village to village. We think a new project focused on shrimp paste in particular could potentially be very high impact.
We do have a volunteer who has recently started researching shrimp paste for us, which we plan to write-up and publish when finished. We're working on this beca...
Epistemic status:
Low resilience
. Quick writeup from an amateur with 0 background in shrimp or animal welfare research. Writing this to spur discussion, and because I can't find a basic writeup of this case anywhere. I would be very happy to be proven wrong on anything in this post :)
TL;DR
Acetes japonicus are potentially
the most common species of animal killed for food production
today, by number of individuals.
They are used to create akiami shrimp paste
, a product used predominantly as a flavoring base in Southeast Asian and Southern Chinese cuisines.
There's some reason to believe shrimp paste could be easier to create plant based substitutes for, compared to other shrimp products, and that the alternative proteins market might not naturally have the right incentives to create excellent substitutes very quickly.
I'm unsure if anyone has done targeted welfare research on these animals, to answer basic questions like: Do they suffer? How much?
This seems like a huge gap in the effective animal advocacy space: I'd be really excited to see more work done here.
Important
There are a lot of individuals here:
A recent Rethink Priorities
survey
of shrimp killed in food production, concluded tentatively that:
There are
3.9-50.2 trillion wild caught A. japonicus individuals
killed every year for food production
A. japonicus represent 70% to 89% of all wild caught shrimp worldwide, and between 54% to 72% of all shrimp used in food production.
This implies that
A. japonicus are currently the most common species killed for food production
.
[1]
Below I have adapted a
figure
from the authors to include A. japonicus (although note the error bars on both of the shrimp estimates are very wide).
It seems plausible we should care about these individuals:
I'm not really sure what evidence we have on the welfare capacity of A. japonicus (although note this
report
on shrimp sentience more generally). But it seems hard to rule out the fact that we care about these shrimp without further research.
I think this argument from another Rethink Priorities
post
probably applies:
Small invertebrates, like shrimp and insects, have relatively low probabilities of being sentient but are extremely numerous. But because these probabilities aren't
extremely
low - closer to 0.1 than to 0.000000001 - the number of individuals carries enormous weight. As a result, EV maximization tends to favor actions that benefit numerous animals with relatively low probabilities of sentience over actions that benefit larger animals of more certain sentience.
In general,
not spending a ton of time investigating to what extent the animals most killed for food production matter morally
seems clearly like a big mistake.
Neglected
You might expect that Shrimp Welfare Project would be working on this problem, but they are explicitly not planning to do this.
Here is what they say about A. japonicus
:
The majority of wild-caught shrimps are a single species - A. japonicus - and are crushed and used to produce "
shrimp paste
", a salty, fermented condiment used in Southeast Asian and Southern Chinese cuisine. We believe the shrimp paste market is very different to the contexts in which we work (i.e. the international import/export market for
L. Vannamei / P. Monodo
n shrimps). It's often made by fishing families in coastal villages, and production techniques can vary from village to village. We think a new project focused on shrimp paste in particular could potentially be very high impact.
We do have a volunteer who has recently started researching shrimp paste for us, which we plan to write-up and publish when finished. We're working on this beca...